User blog:Brainwashd/Strategy Guide portion
While I understand that strategy guides ruin games and that the current setup of the wiki reporting factual information is the best way to present the content of the game with minimal spoilers for the gameplay, I think I would still like to see a strategy guide section in this wiki if only so I can see all the cool strategies other people have come up with in becoming a Master of Magic. I've dumped a couple thousand hours into the game so I could probably be a major contributor. I'll post here a draft-like taste of a starting strategies combinations page: *Spoilers for the highest difficulties of Master of Magic follow from most cheesy and easiest to execute to toughest to execute successfully* Cheese Tier: *11 black book wraiths *11 white book invulnerable guardian spirits *Runemaster Artificer combo, such as 2 White 2 Red 2 Blue Runemaster Artificer Warlord Alchemy - Use Heroism Slingers, Hellhounds, and Countermagic with infinite mana artifact creation and Uber Heroes. *9 Sorcery + Sorcery Mastery + Conjurer for 2.5 times more Phantom warriors, which were already debateably the best thing in combat magic already early going Tier 1: *4+white Alchemy Warlord Channeler Heroism Slingers, Archmage is probably a good idea Tier 1.5: *1 red 1 green 4 blue Node Mastery Sorcery Mastery Alchemy Warlord - Sorcery nodes produce 4 times the normal amount of power! Conquering 3 or 4 sorcery nodes early on can end the game. Laugh as a melded node changes your Powerbase from 6 to 46. Because of the map generation, over 40% of the nodes are Sorcery - and you get double value from all the others anyway! Sometimes as much as 50-60% of the nodes spawn as sorcery, in fact. Put together some ranged that can kill the phantom warriors and beasts and rush sturdy Melee + Web for the Air Elementals and Djinn. *9 red books + Chaos Mastery + Conjurer - 8 mana fire elementals, 16 mana hell hounds. If you can't have an explosive start with that, you aren't playing right. You still have 9 books in fire so when things slow down you'll have a perfectly fine game from there... plus Chimaera so cheap you can put one in every town on the map! You'll certainly feel the lack of channeler in this setup, but getting it ruins your discounts. Hell hounds might be the best cheap unit in the game, costing the post-alchemy equivalent of 2 gold upkeep (less than the relative value of 1 food, which is worth extremely roughly about 3 gold, sometimes more). Only 2 things prevent the ideal strategy being flooding the map with hell hounds: Garrison Unrest and Unit Veterancy. Elite units compete favorably against hell hounds. That said, unless you are playing white with altar of battle you will perpetually have a front full of tenuous holdings and new settlements with a fresh nonelite guard. This makes stocking hell hounds on the front lines or frontiers for extra security perpetually useful. It also takes almost 100 turns for elite units to start cropping up; this build can wipe out 2-3 wizards in about that time. So if Hell Hounds are this great at the post-Alchemy exchange of 2 gold per turn upkeep, they must be broken at Alchemy/Channelers 1/2 gold per turn upkeep, which in fact they are... *Alchemy/Warlord/Channeler/Chaos Mastery/Conjurer 4 red books - Dog patrol. Summon Hell Hounds at 40% off, then maintain them at 1/2 gold per turn upkeep. Sure, make your palladins and slingers and longbows and stag beetles w/ Alchemy+Warlord, but put large stacks of hell hounds with them. In fact, put large stacks of hell hounds everywhere; in every garrison, every node, every attack stack, with all your questing heroes. Why not? They cost roughly 1/6th the price of a spearman to upkeep with Alchemy + Channeler. With 4 chaos books you are close to guaranteed a decent attack spell for combat eventually, as statistically you only need 3 chaos books to get good odds on 1 uncommon or better attack spell out of red.. Channeler will keep the cost down as you spam it. Regardless of where your killer stack is, your entire empire is practically immune to light attack, requiring mid tier fantastic units or high tier ranged units to penetrate defenses anywhere. Tier 2: *Alchemy Warlord Channeler 1 green 4 blue Sorcery Mastery Halflings - Trade for sprites and use them early with phantom warriors. Trade for change terrain pathfinding and basilisk and use them. Midgame your sorcery comes on, make use of flight and invisibility to turn the tables. You have very good odds at hitting a bomb rare or very rare in blue; use it to win the game! *Alchemy Warlord Channeler Famous 4 black Halflings - Bum rush all early towns with ghouls spamming weakness and creating a wave of undead. Kill all neighbors 1 at a time and expand like wildfire, using undead garrisons. Your chances at a bomb rare or very rare aren't as good as blue's, but black can sometimes have such an explosive start that you could have 0 books midgame and onward and still win. *Ideal Research Node Mastery Sorcery Mastery Alchemy Archmage Sage Master 1 red 1 green 4 blue - 4x Sorcery nodes with the powerbase trio of Alchemy/Archmage/Sage Master. Set Mana wand to 0 and use archmage to minimize skill investment, then invest heavily in research with Sage Master and Sorcery Mastery buffing tech for shockingly fash research. This build has some challenges - it lacks warlord, meaning your early game in particular can get slow or even a little rough. It also only has a limited amount of Rares and V. Rares to research in blue, and if you miss on things like Sky Drake or Invisibility it can be hard to make your research pay off. Fortunately this is one of the best setups for trading imaginable so you often can either trade off your garbage and/or race to arcane spells and trade them off for goodies. Keep on good terms with a distant rival Sorceror if possible and you'll pick up bombs like Flight or Invisbility with more regularity. With Node mastery at roughly 33% more power, Sorc Mastery roughly 17% to powerbase, more with the 4x combo, Alchemy setting mana wand to 0 for extremely roughly 33% more to powerbase, Archmage granting 50% extra power in the skill wand and Sage master 25% in research, you are taking just about all the powerbase boost retorts possible. This is just about the closest you can get to the ultimate Theurgist build; you'll find that it'll only take a few nodes and you'll be off to the races. Some sample Tier 3 builds (there are too many to list): *10 black books + Alchemy - Black can somewhat get away with no channeler due to lower upkeep costs and in particular, 1 upkeep cost on ghouls. But black does a LOT of combat casting so no channeler still really hurts here, even if you are being extremely judicious in your use of magic and quickly field caster heroes to lessen the burden. Still, this is probably the best way to see all 40 spells in black that isn't a cheesy 11 book strat. *9 black books + Channeler - Most of black and with one the most essential retorts for black. You'll miss not having alchemy, but dropping down to 8 books neuters your very rare count down to 5 out of 10 and you lose 10% off casting costs (particularly dropping weakness from 5 mana to 4). Again, adding retorts like alchemy warlord famous infernal power is just a stronger strategy than having a larger share of the rares and very rares to cast, but these are meant to be a challenge. Still impossible difficulty viable. *9 red books + Channeler - Deepest fire build that I still like with perhaps the strongest complementary retort. Fire lacks economic buffs, so Myrran isn't as big of a help for it as it is for W/B/G. Alchemy is worth adding but this is a challenge build. You still benefit substantially from having warlord, which is slightly worse in red due to the fantastic heavy start but still good enough all game long to drop 2 books to select. I find Chaos Mastery to be the weakest of the 3 elemental masteries, and I rarely select it. *10 green books + 1 blue book - The best deep green wizard is at least 1 book blue. Trade your weak green spells in for blue ones. Resist Magic + Basilisk. Spell Lock + Resist Elements, Resist Magic, Iron Skin, Regeneration. Flight + any green ground summon. Aura of Majesty + Mass Expand Change Terrain spam. Counter Magic, Confusion, and Phantom Warriors in combat to complement your Web and Cracks Call spells. You are 100% guaranteed to have Change Terrain, Gaea's Blessing, Move Fortress, Great Wyrm, and Regeneration. Be warned, this is one of the most challenging starts, because green is pretty weak, but I can confirm that it can work on impossible. *8 green books + Myrran - You might want to check for Gaea's Blessing in your runes before you start this game. This is a much easier game than an Arcanus start with 10 green books; fewer neighbors, more powerful land. With change terrain you can settle just about any terrain specials and get away with it. Basilisks should tame the mighty Sss'Ra and any others but it's probably better to expand wildly and just take the whole map rather than piss him/them off any other way. *10 blue books + Sorcery Mastery - Suprisingly powerful. The discount lets you summon plenty of phantom warriors, and you'll need to. Late game Sorcery rares and VR are so powerful they take over the game by themselves; this strategy is mostly about hanging on and being somewhat competitive in stats until then. Settling primarily University races in good locations only (rather than everywhere) alongside Aura of Majesty should keep people off your back; rival wizards get mad if you have too many cities. If you are feeling cheesy, Flight and Invisibility and Spell Lock on a Warship is an easy victory. If you aren't, Invisibility should give you traction with Heroes. *4 green 1 blue 1 red Node Mastery Nature Mastery Alchemy Archmage Conjurer - Green sprites and war bears have too high an upkeep and green has too few game changers to research into for this to be a high tier build, but its doable. You'll find the commons and uncommons from red and blue often taking over the game despite 4 times the investment into green! Having doable nodes nearby at the start will make or break this build's viability. It's hard to risk a High Elf start when you are gonna miss on Change Terrain about half the time. You'll definitely feel the lack of Warlord, but hey, this is challenge tier. Deep investments into books tends to be quite a bit weaker than retort-heavy alternatives, even if you select sub-optimal retorts. Retorts Roughly speaking, from strongest to weakest: Myrran, Alchemy, Warlord, Channeler, Node Mastery, Charismatic, Archmage, Sorcery/Nature/Chaos Mastery, Famous, Infernal Power, Divine Power, Sage Master, Runemaster, Conjurer, Mana Focusing, Artificer #Myrran lets you settle the richest plane with the fewest neighbors with the strongest races. White/Black/Green have economic benefits in the form of undead garrisons, city buffs, and terrain improvements, which can allow these colors to excel in peacetime. Myrror often only has one rival wizard on it, allowing for lots of peaceful expansion. Green in particular can make optimal use of the terrain specials through use of change terrain to spruce up otherwise weak city settlement sites. #Alchemy makes your starting troops roughly 33% more effective, gives magic weapons to gnolls klackons trolls and more and to any city that doesn't have a alchemist's guild yet. The 1:1: Gold:Mana would be worth it alone, as it allows you to invest almost exclusively in Research and Spell Skill from the end of the early game until the end of the game. Incredible at 1 pick. It is absolutely baffling that this retort only costs 1 pick and not 2; this would make one of the better 2-pick retorts; get it, use it, love it. #Warlord is pound for pound one of the top picks, as newly made troops gain +1 attack, only need 60xp to hit elite, and can become ultra-elite, improving their chance to hit by another 10% (at 50% to hit going to 60% to hit, this is in a vacuum about 20% more effectiveness alone and once enemy defense is calculated, it is often much more) Elite Units often double their HP value and this can be very decisive relative to their ability to survive enemy combat magic, ranged fire, or outlast in melee combat as their survivability almost doubles as well. Even the heaviest summoner of fantastic units will feature normal units in their attacking stacks, and every city needs garrisons, and many of those garrisons will be tested. This is a sure-fire way to improve the quality of those attacking stacks and garrisons that has no upkeep and no downside besides a scant 2 starting picks. In more typical play, though, you'll use normal units for just about everything, and Warlord can provide a decisive advantage almost everywhere time and time again. #Channeler lets you do twice as much magic before the upkeep incapacitates you. Oftentimes the best strategy will involve casting a lot of the same spell - Sprites, or Heroism, for instance. Channeler lets you spam your latest and greatest magic. It also lets you spam combat magic, which is of particular interest to black & red, to a lesser extent white and blue, but really all colors will make extensive use out of it. In a black ghoul rush opener, often 60% or more of your total mana income will go towards spamming spells like weakness and black sleep in combat. Channeler reduces these costs dramatically. If you are not going warlord, you are almost certainly going channeler... and well, why not both? #Node Mastery grants double power from nodes and lets you cast inside nodes. For my particular playstyle, nodes make up roughly 33% of powerbase income in a typical game, with a few exceptions: early on, node contribution tends to be a higher % of mana income, and late game, node contribution tends to be lower due to impractical to conquer myrran nodes despite a settled myrror. Black benefits most from being able to cast hexes inside but branching out to 4 colors is a bad idea as it gives you too little depth in a single color or you have to give up too many retorts. Practically speaking, being able to spam phantom warriors in all nodes is a nice perk, plus after your trades, you should be able to garrison hell hounds in red nodes, sprites in green nodes, and hell hounds in blue nodes (nagas are weak), regardless of whether you picked red green or blue as your concentration. #Charismatic essentially allows you to gift a couple spells to a wizard and not have to worry about that wizard trying to kill you until you have settled half the world. This is powerful since the most common way to lose is muliple war declarations from enemy wizards wearing you down, particularly strong ones or runaways that you could only really combat when a particular unit hero or summon comes down the pipe. Overall it is one of the most useful retorts for any non-black strategy (black wizards are better off using subversion than trying to overcome their diplomacy penalties), particularly spell-for-spell traders, as it keeps wars away and allows for temporary peace trades even where there are wars. #Archmage gives you 50% bonus yield in Spell Skill and +10 skill that isn't part of the formula for skill increases. A 22% increase in total spell skill once the +10 skill becomes insignificant. This is a fairly nice boost. That said, the +10 skill remains significant through most of the tenuous parts of the game and early game skill can make a big difference if you've got combat magic that matters. The main problem archmage has is that is dwarfed by Alchemy, which can let you set the mana wand to 0 for the rest of the game, which often means Alchemy beats archmage at its own game! There's nothing stopping you from taking both, though. #Sorcery Mastery is probably the strongest of the 3 elemental masteries due to the high spawn rate of Sorcery Nodes on Arcanus and Myrror. The 15% discount on Sorcery is the strongest part, and Sorcery magic gets good use out of double resistance to dispels; practically everything is an enchantment in blue! Sorcery Nodes turn up almost twice as often as the other two elemental nodes, so double yield from sorcery nodes is probably about an extremely roughly speaking 17% boost to powerbase. #Nature Mastery is the next strongest due to dispel protection being important to green, but green nodes are much rarer than Sorcery Nodes. The 15% discount is still the best part, but Nature nodes giving double yield will probably only buff your powerbase by roughly 8%. Nature lacks Spell Lock and so arguably having dispel protection on this color that is also full of powerful enchantments is even more important. #Chaos Mastery probably has the least impact of the 3 elemental masteries, although they are all pretty similar. Chaos does look to preserve its lesser enchantments of Eldritch Weapon and Flame Blade upon targets, and preserve a battlefield enchanted with Warp Reality, so while many Chaos spells are instant use, some value from double resistance to dispels is there. The 15% discount is felt in combat magic, for sure. I don't particularly like Chaos Mastery, I find alternative retorts to be stronger. If Iron Skin is dispelled, green often loses; Flame blade or Eldritch Weapon is rarely as decisive. #Famous doubles your chances at hiring heroes. White gets good use out of its heroes and would like to field 5 or 6 quickly, which is what this retort sorta does for you. Black wants to shop for casters and needs replacement heroes somewhat often, Famous allows for both. Red needs replacement heroes the most frequently of anyone and Famous can give you in excess of 5% chance per turn to sign one. Green doesn't make particularly great use of Famous, as it tends to not have Iron Skin and Regeneration until the late game, at which point it has accumulated a few without Famous. Regeneration removes hero turnover reducing the need for famous even further. Blue needs the military help but struggles to support them outside of countermagic and dispels until much later when they can enchant them with Invisibility. Even so, Melee heroes would need to be tough and have items and ranged heroes need arcane power or blademaster to truly make a difference. White and Black make the best use of Famous; Black in particular gets decent mileage on this retort when paired with -Enemy Resist items. Still, theres a lot of gambling that your initial hero is good, and that this retort will impact your game with strong hero abilities at all; this makes Famous expensive at 2 picks. for the gamble. I wouldn't consider it with Red or Green, only White Black or Blue. #Infernal Power is in a notibly lower tier than the prior picks, but this triples urban mana with the combination of dark rituals. without DR, you get 1 extra rebel calmed at temple, and 2 extra rebels calmed at cathedral due to Infernal Power. This offsets the otherwise pesky rebel DR would give you and gives an extra rebel calming for big cities with cathedrals. I think my biggest problem with Infernal Power is that other than the shrine, the religious building line is expensive to produce, whereas the research line (library sages guild university) is cheap. This means you really should only be using the religious line when it quells rebellion. Yes you can run higher taxes, but parthenons and cathedrals are tremendously expensive and building purchasing is better in hamlets where a granary or a library will be very cheap and still have an impact. All that said, most cities will build at least a shrine and a temple, and infernal power there is worth 3 mana per city, which is a pretty good deal, albeit not the best possible for 2 picks. #Divine Power lacks the Dark Rituals combo. You get the same benefits as Infernal Power though, just 5 mana per city at cathedral. IMHO, this isn't worth it. With temples in most of your cities, this would be offering a scant 1 mana boost. #Sage Master IIRC is functionally about a 20% boost to research (25% more goes in the wand). Again Alchemy crushes Sage Master at its own game by letting you set the mana wand to 0 as soon as the early game ends and leave it at 0 for the rest of the game. Sage Master is weaker than archmage, and you are probably also better off with archmage if you want increases to research since an archmage can invest in less skill and more research and end up with bigger overall yields. #Runemaster suffers from a terrible requirement which renders it all but useless barring infinite mana artifact strategies. It is otherwise a somewhat passable effect of 25% more in the research wand for all arcane spells and 25% cheaper arcane spells. Having a cheaper Summon Hero and Summon Champion is pretty nice. And double strength dispels combine nicely with a Sorcery-heavy strategy which already plans to dispel enemy magic. But again, Runemaster's requirement of 6 picks across 3 colors ruins your wizard and so this otherwise semi-decent retort sees little use. #Conjurer pairs extremely nicely with other mana cost reduction effects and can make for some potentially game-breaking combinations used in this manner. Otherwise, though, conjurer's effects are quite limited. Fantastic units in MoM tend to be weaker then well targetted buff spells, and there are a large number of non-summoning spells each color gets; green, the heaviest on creature summoning still has over 70% of its spells as non-summoning spells. While conjurer can be handy to keep costs down somewhat, Fantastic units tend to have a limited impact in a game of MoM; the uncommons and rares are frequently weak and yet they are - for a large portion of the game - the best thing you can summon. Usually the best conjurer plan is aided most not by conjurer but by Channeler, which will keep upkeeps down and allow you to field more total Fantastic units. #Mana Focusing can sometimes be tempting if you lose a couple early games where you are fully invested in your mana wand, but it's garbage. It's far better to select Alchemy and use alchemy to transmute gold into mana, or even select archmage and fund your mana wand proportionally more. #Artificer is nice for fast spell trading particularly when you are black and red and everyone automatically hates you so trades must be quick before endless war breaks out. Red gets little use out of items however black does benefit a little... -enemy spell save wands can be nice to make if you are black or blue early on. If you are feeling cheesy, put x4 Black Sleep or x4 Confusion on that wand for free and all of a sudden this become a mid tier retort due to the explosive early game benefit of x4 spell charges:D Overall, good "best in slot" items still cost as much as the Spell of Mastery using Create Artifact, and items only benefit heroes and even then only benefit certain heroes, so artificer doesn't have a wide effect or a particularly large impact on a game of Master of Magic. What Race should I pick? Probably Halfling. Why? They produce slingers, one of the cheapest and deadliest ranged units in the game, also of the ranged units, they are one of the most surviveable. Halfling have the lowest Interracial Unrest on average of all the races. They produce 3 food per farmer, and you'll always need a few farming cities in your empire no matter where you go from there. Here's a general list of Endgame-quality troops. In most games, your midgame goal is prepare and field these units: *War trolls - Troll *Paladins - High Men *Slingers* - Halfling (flame blade, lionheart, mythril, adamantium) *Hammerhands - Dwarf *Warlocks - Dark Elf *Heroes, casters and ranged are best. Melee which combine some mix of Might/Agility/Constitution/Blademaster can work. *Arch Angel w/ support- White Very Rare *Death Knights - Black Very Rare *Wraiths - Black Rare *Great Drake - Red Very Rare *Colossus - Green Very Rare *Great Wyrm - Green Very Rare *Sky Drake - Blue Very Rare Stacks of these units often become unstoppable and dominate the endgame of Master of Magic with minimal attrition, properly piloted. This isn't an exhaustive list. Your wizard picks also change what's viable. Category:Blog posts